eSTREAM

This article has multiple issues. Please help improve it or discuss these issues on the talk page. (Learn how and when to remove these messages) This article relies excessively on references to primary sources. Please improve this article by adding secondary or tertiary sources. Find sources: "ESTREAM" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (April 2015) (Learn how and when to remove this message) This article may be too technical for most readers to understand. Please help improve it to make it understandable to non-experts, without removing the technical details. (June 2023) (Learn how and when to remove this message) The topic of this article may not meet Wikipedia's general notability guideline. Please help to demonstrate the notability of the topic by citing reliable secondary sources that are independent of the topic and provide significant coverage of it beyond a mere trivial mention. If notability cannot be shown, the article is likely to be merged, redirected, or deleted. Find sources: "ESTREAM" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (June 2023) (Learn how and when to remove this message) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

eSTREAM is a project to "identify new stream ciphers suitable for widespread adoption",^[1][2] organised by the EU ECRYPT network. It was set up as a result of the failure of all six stream ciphers submitted to the NESSIE project. The call for primitives was first issued in November 2004. The project was completed in April 2008. The project was divided into separate phases and the project goal was to find algorithms suitable for different application profiles.

The submissions to eSTREAM fall into either or both of two profiles:

• Profile 1: "Stream ciphers for software applications with high throughput requirements"
• Profile 2: "Stream ciphers for hardware applications with restricted resources such as limited storage, gate count, or power consumption."

Both profiles contain an "A" subcategory (1A and 2A) with ciphers that also provide authentication in addition to encryption. In Phase 3 none of the ciphers providing authentication are being considered (The NLS cipher had authentication removed from it to improve its performance).

As of September 2011^[update] the following ciphers make up the eSTREAM portfolio:^[3]

These are all free for any use. Rabbit was the only one that had a patent pending during the eStream competition, but it was released into the public domain in October 2008.^[4]

The original portfolio, published at the end of Phase 3, consisted of the above ciphers plus F-FCSR which was in Profile 2.^[5] However, cryptanalysis of F-FCSR ^[6] led to a revision of the portfolio in September 2008 which removed that cipher.

Phase 1 included a general analysis of all submissions with the purpose of selecting a subset of the submitted designs for further scrutiny. The designs were scrutinized based on criteria of security, performance (with respect to the block cipher AES—a US Government approved standard, as well as the other candidates), simplicity and flexibility, justification and supporting analysis, and clarity and completeness of the documentation. Submissions in Profile 1 were only accepted if they demonstrated software performance superior to AES-128 in counter mode.

Activities in Phase 1 included a large amount of analysis and presentations of analysis results as well as discussion. The project also developed a framework for testing the performance of the candidates. The framework was then used to benchmark the candidates on a wide variety of systems.

On 27 March 2006, the eSTREAM project officially announced the end of Phase 1.

On 1 August 2006, Phase 2 was officially started. For each of the profiles, a number of algorithms has been selected to be Focus Phase 2 algorithms. These are designs that eSTREAM finds of particular interest and encourages more cryptanalysis and performance evaluation on these algorithms. Additionally a number of algorithms for each profile are accepted as Phase 2 algorithms, meaning that they are still valid as eSTREAM candidates. The Focus 2 candidates will be re-classified every six months.

Phase 3 started in April 2007. Candidates for Profile 1 (software) were:

Candidates for Profile 2 (hardware) were:

Phase 3 ended on 15 April 2008, with the announcement of the candidates that had been selected for the final eSTREAM portfolio. The selected algorithms were:

• For Profile 1: HC-128, Rabbit, Salsa20/12, and SOSEMANUK.
• For Profile 2: F-FCSR-H v2, Grain v1, Mickey v2, and Trivium.

The eSTREAM portfolio ciphers are, as of January 2012^[update]:^[7]

Versions of the eSTREAM portfolio ciphers that support extended key lengths:

Note that the 128-bit version of Grain v1 is no longer supported by its designers and has been replaced by Grain-128a. Grain-128a is not considered to be part of the eSTREAM portfolio.

As of December 2008^[update]:

This cipher was in the original portfolio but was removed in revision 1, published in September 2008.

• AES process
• CAESAR Competition – Competition to design authenticated encryption schemes
• NESSIE
• CRYPTREC

• Homepage for the project Archived 2012-04-15 at the Wayback Machine
  • Discussion forum Archived 2012-04-22 at the Wayback Machine
  • The eSTREAM testing framework eSTREAM Optimized Code HOWTO Archived 2012-06-15 at the Wayback Machine
  • Update 1: (PDF) Archived 2012-07-17 at the Wayback Machine
• Notes on the ECRYPT Stream Cipher project by Daniel J. Bernstein